Image © Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation The longlist for the 2025 Booker Prize—arguably the most prestigious award for a single work of fiction published in the UK—was announced today. The 13 books, known as the “Booker Dozen,” were Read more >
The end of July is nigh in a summer that has at once flown by and felt curiously glacial. As August approaches, I come bearing literary tidings: sixteen new books to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. You’ll find a Read more >
A year ago, I walked into Hollywood with the following hand of brilliant ideas. While I thought my meeting with 20th Century Studios went well, I never heard back. I was disappointed, sure. But such is life in the fast Read more >
[Last week, Columbia University reached an agreement with the Trump administration to “resolve multiple federal agency investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws.” As part of the agreement, Columbia will pay a $200 million settlement to the federal government Read more >
Netflix has at last released the trailer for Train Dreams, the much-anticipated adaptation of the late Denis Johnson’s novella. Starring Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton in what some Sundance viewers have called apex performances, the film is taking a turn Read more >
If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly wondering, “How do these aloof and frankly cold male mice keep attracting partners?!” Science has an answer: Blame it on the darcin. Back in 2010, a team of biologists at the University of Read more >
It was a rough one out there. No need to beat around the bush. Our happiness involved escape. We binged period pieces and anticipated glorious trash. We snacked and cycled. We zoned out to masters at work, and applied ourselves Read more >
Another long summer week, with more downs than ups. A few too many bad stories, villains, and greats leaving the stage. And don’t stop making noise about Gaza; my colleague Dan put together a list of ways to help Gazans Read more >
“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.” These are the words of Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who posted on X earlier today that more than 100 people, Read more >
Another day, another great literary website bites the dust. Next summer, we’ll apparently say “auf wiedersehen” to 4Columns, a bastion of long-form arts criticism. 4Columns makes a practice of covering fringier offerings, like experimental theatre, fashion, and jazz. They publish Read more >
Random House announced today that a brand new novel by George Saunders will be landing on bookshelves this winter, on January 27, 2026. Vigil takes “place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his Read more >
Thirty years ago this week, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless hit theaters and brought us all one of cinema’s most perfect creations—Cher Horowitz. Based on Emma Wodehouse, of Jane Austen’s Emma, Cher was as vibrant as she was delulu. Not to be Read more >
Another wild week for the makers of the popular predictive chatbots and large, generative pretrained transformer software. Here are just a couple stories about AI that came across my desk this week. Baldacci Burns Businesses The fallout around the discovery Read more >
Photo by Esraa Abo Qamar A small bookstall in the central Gaza Strip is keeping reading alive amidst Israel’s unrelenting chaos and violence, The Electronic Intifada reports. The stall, called Eqraa Ketabak (Read Your Book), is run by Salah and Read more >
The Writers Guild of America issued a strongly worded statement Friday about Colbert’s cancellation. Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that The Late Show’s cancellation is a Read more >
Today, the DAG Foundation announced the winners of its inaugural DAG Prizes, which award $20,000 each to a visual artist, a writer, and a musician “whose work expands the possibilities for American art.” According to the Foundation, the DAG Prize Read more >
The wheel of the year continues its slow, strange turn, a turning at once painfully glacial and precipitously swift. At the moment, the wheel has landed upon a morass of MAGA conspiracies, lurid revelations about the President’s relationship with an Read more >
There have been a few great covers for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There have also been a lot of bad ones. It makes sense: it’s a difficult book to represent—which means that when it’s done right, there’s a special kind of Read more >
This week, we’re fulfilling prophecies, and pledges to past selves. We bought the tickets and took the rides. Some of us into the archive. Some of us into the dungeon. And some of us out to greener pastures. Calvin Kasulke Read more >
Kylie Cheung’s forthcoming book Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans is a searing investigation into the intersecting structures that control the lives of women and pregnant people. In her introduction, Cheung writes that the book “is my best attempt to Read more >
